"I think games connect us to a time when we had time. In your youth, time is elastic. You have exactly as much of it as you need. You have no responsibilities. No job, no children. Nothing but time, and friends, and shit to play with. When we play games now, as adults with too much stuff going on, we do so because we’ve made time for them. We’ve set time aside to indulge in some nonsense with people we love. When you make that time, you HAVE that time. And when you have that time, it’s like being back there – back in that place, that living room, that bedroom, that house full of memories. With time to spare, and everything exactly as it was." Oh, Rab. Marvellous.

"For the past 20 years I’ve had this urge to make a series of games that never were – mainly to suggest lost archives now discovered; to create an emotional resonance akin to that experienced by, say, new-found Beatles demo tapes – but also the idea of recreating contemporary games and themes in an old style to suggest an alternative past and present." Lovely writing, smart ideas, nice little game, but the clarity of thought is the real stand-out here. Another example of why I love Denki so much.

"Perhaps we should be turning up at the cinema expecting more stories about resilience, or reports from the future where the problems are what to do with limitless energy, or Japanese consciousness multipliers, rather than dustbowls and gasmask hipsters. Authors: is that nihilism really what you want to leave behind? Your silhouette a stoop, rather than a hurrah?" Jim, quite rightly, likes his "shiny retro shit".

"When their fond memories of these games are challenged, they become nearly catatonic. Really, most of these players were just mashing ‘fierce punch’ as hard as they could and occasionally pulling off a quarter-circle turn. Once they’re faced with online competition… Well, they may be in for a terrible shock.”

"...with that sad note from Sarinee Achavanuntakul, one of the most enduring (if illegal) tributes to gaming history came to an end." Home of the Underdogs is no more; just gone, like that. It wasn't that it had the best games or the worst games, or that they were illegal, or free; it was history, and childhood, and the smell of cardboard and boot disks, all wrapped up in one giant cathedral to Good Old Games. Most things I played on my old DOS machine were there. A shame; I hope they're elsewhere. This is why we need proper game archives.

"The problem with remakes and ports for the critic, especially those of old beloved games, is emotional baggage. It's difficult to give a cold, measured critique of something you've loved since childhood. How can you give an objective appraisal when every time you hear the game's start-up melody your mind soaks happy in memories of warm endless school holidays, and that delicious, pure, all-encompassing escapism unique to children who play videogames? This game's story is also a part of my story, so it's impossible to get much distance between the two." A lovely paragraph in Simon's review of the DS Chrono Trigger re-release.